Commedia
by DrRabbit
Summary: Matt's a mercenary tech whiz in L.A. who aspires to become a world-class detective. On a job, he stumbles across his childhood best friend, now a violent, sexy Mafioso. MelloxMatt. AU and likely M in later chapters.
1. I: The Case of the Awkward Reunion

Commedia

Part One: Inferno

Chapter One: The Case of the Awkward Reunion

The nightclub was called Inferno.

The damp heat of too many sinners pressing in on one another in the sweltering July heat had me wishing I was at home on the settee in the midst of an all-nighter with _Call of Duty 4_. Sweat collected behind my goggles, moistening my cheeks and nose. It was too hot to wear them but it was either that or make eye contact with drunk strangers. I wasn't one for crowds or for loud dance music, which was so invasive I could swear my very eardrums were vibrating in tempo. It was the money that brought me to this hellhole in the middle of the L.A. night, the money and a recent personal tragedy and a little curiosity.

I was piss poor, living in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. in a shithole flat where the bathwater ran scalding hot for five minutes and freezing the next three. I still hadn't figured out how to stop myself looking boiled every time I showered. But my perilous plumbing wasn't the worst of it. Two days ago someone had broken into my place and taken my beloved X-Box 360 and my PS3, and—most devastating of all—my brand-new Nintendo Wii with additional Wiimote and Nunchuck, as well as the wireless guitar I'd bought for Guitar Hero 3 only that afternoon.

Bastards. I never even got to rock out once.

Point being, there were only so many times I could play _Mario Kart_ alone until I lost interest. I was in serious need of some green. I had enough money saved over from my last job (a thankfully short-lived private contract with the Federal Bureau of Intimidation) to pay the rent for the next few months. Restricting oneself to the N-64 in 2009 is no way for a man to live, but I wasn't dim-witted enough to spend my rent money replacing my systems. So when the email came through to my private work account cordially requesting my "presense" at Inferno, I grabbed my keys and bolted.

Well, I smoked a fag and dug around the cushions of the settee until I found my keys, and then I _sauntered_. Let it never be said I don't do things in my own bloody time.

It was a quick saunter, though, because if the grammatical state of the email was any indication, I was being offered a contract with a firm long established, long dreaded, long subjected to interpretation by pop culture. _The Godfather_. _The Untouchables_. _Goodfellas._ _Mickey Blue Eyes_.

Matt, meet the Mafia.

Although I'd better not mention that last film when I finally _did_.

The owners had made the most of their theme. The ugly red and yellow of the wall paint was brighter and more garish still through the orange lenses of my goggles. On a platform above the dance floor swayed hired girls in sequined horns and tails. Flickering streamers simulating flames encircled them, blown endlessly upward by what I supposed were fans set into the floor. The DJ was in another corner, one hand hovering over his turntable and the other on the large purple headphones nestled in his rather fluffy hair.

Lounging at the bar on an uncomfortable wrought-iron barstool, fag in one hand and a thankfully cold Negra Modelo in the other, I breathed a silent prayer for Dante Alighieri. The poor man had surely been turning anguished back-flips in his grave since this literal hellhole opened two weeks earlier.

A fog machine near the bar belched out a veritable wall of dry ice, preventing my seeing the dance floor. Well, I thought, at least they won't try to throw me out for smoking. Christ, what a hole.

I checked the clock over the bar, barely visible between the fog and the glare of the neon Yuengling sign right under it. Twelve-thirty. Fifteen minutes until my meeting with my prospective employer. Good job I wouldn't need to be there much longer. The air in the place was thick with dry ice and disappointment, and my bum was getting a little too well acquainted with the complex whorls and points of the wrought-iron barstool. I noticed with some disappointment that my fag had burned down to the filter while I observed the club. An inspection of my pack revealed it was about half full, affording me plenty more smokes so long as the meeting didn't run too long. I'd still probably need to hit the Quik-Stop on the way back to my place so as to make certain I'd have some tomorrow morning.

I threw the pack down on the counter and prepared to smoke another fag. Couldn't find my lighter. Blast. That was the third I'd lost this week. The bird on the stool to my left—sequined sandals in a popular style, face pretty but blurred with too much makeup, massive bazonkas, but hey, this was L.A. and everyone had great tits—offered me a light, which I accepted. She smiled at me long and slow with her glossy lips.

I might have tried to take her home had I been the same as I was during my first months back in L.A., a nineteen-year-old kid overwhelmed by the shine and the speed and the beautiful, beautiful people. I would have charmed the short skirt right off her with the British mannerisms that American girls absolutely drool over, let her play with my proverbial joystick before sliding her over me. Now I felt a bit sorry for her. She was just a girl, alone in a second-rate nightclub stinking of shitty alcohol and sweating bodies and, though far stronger near the back patio, of vomit.

But then, I was Nobby No-friends myself. Not that I minded. I did have some basic social interaction while working. Odd tech jobs, some legal and many more not, kept me in games and cigarettes. Almost all could be performed at a computer from a remote location. Often I met with my employers only once to sign the contract and arrange payment. For a year I had ventured out of my L.A. flat only for groceries and cigarettes. Even at Wammy's, I spent most of my time in solitary activities: gaming, hacking, avoiding the struggles between the most competitive of the Wammy's kids. I was long used to isolation.

The girl was eyeing me with a bit more interest now. Damn. I enjoyed the attention—sometimes it is just _nice_ to have a girl look at you in that way, whether you plan to act on it or not—but I was here on business that was likely both illegal and dangerous. The absolute last thing I needed was some girl with a detailed memory of my face should things go to shit. I had to get her off the scent.

The first, and probably most effective, method that came to me would require a bit of self-debasement. Not something I usually mind, as I hoped never to return to the Inferno after this meeting, but after all, one doesn't want the Mafia to think one is an enormous poofter. If they happened to catch wind of my little act in the next eleven minutes, it might put me rather at a disadvantage when they finally approached me. The Mafia, like most hyper-masculine private organizations in the United States, probably doesn't take kindly to men who appreciate other men.

The girl placed her chin on her hand and leaned toward me. Oh, hell. Had to do something. I tried to glance surreptitiously into the masses around me to make certain no one else was watching a little too closely. Hard to say if I was being observed. I couldn't see anyone watching but that didn't mean they weren't.

Oh, fuck it. I leaned across the bar, popping one flirtatious foot into the air behind me. "Can I get another Negra, luv?" I yelled over the roar of the club to the decidedly masculine barman, who reached one brawny arm into the cooler beneath the bar. The cold bottle made a sharp _thunk_ against the counter.

"Just a mo', I've a fiver in my wallet." I made a big show of scribbling on the five-dollar bill before leaning over the bar and tucking it into his apron with a wink. He took the bill from his apron and read what I'd written.

_Sorry about this, mate._

His red-rimmed eyes met mine and then crinkled into a smile. "Thanks,' he said slowly before moving away to help another patron. The girl tapped her cell phone nervously on the counter a few times. Finally, she seized her mojito and hopped down from her seat. I meant for her to assume I'd given the barman my number. Seemed it worked. Poor girl. I watched her back until she lost herself among the others on the dance floor, then raised my eyes to the club's second level. A few security personnel in red t-shirts stood largely inconspicuous behind the DJ and dancers. The iron barstool creaked under me as I twisted around to face the clock behind the bar again. Twelve forty-two. Not much longer, then. The Negra was cold and smooth and perfect. I picked at the label with my thumb.

Someone spoke behind me. "Mr. Rogers?" I winced inwardly. It had seemed such a good alias at the time. Inconspicuous. Easy to remember—Roger had practically raised me. I loved the man. And, in the event the client recognized the allusion, they already understood that my work was sensitive and so, yes, I used an alias. But I knew from experience I'd spend the next three hours whistling "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."

The barstool let out another harsh groan as I shifted myself to face him.

"I'm Ray Salvatore. I'll be acting as a representative for Mr. Grieves, the owner of this establishment." Salvatore had a florid face and meaty hands, one of which he offered to me. We shook.

"Mr. Salvatore," I said pleasantly. "Fred Rogers. What can I do for you."

If the name was familiar to Salvatore, he didn't show it. "Mr. Grieves wishes to meet with you in his office, to which I will direct you. However, before you meet with him—" He paused. I took another drag and blew the smoke slowly from one corner of my mouth, waiting for him to continue. Salvatore seemed surprisingly well-spoken for a Mafioso. I supposed he was one of their law boys, the select few out of each generation who attend law school and represent the firm in court should the need arise.

"Our work is delicate," he said. "Before you decide to accept or decline our offer, I should impress upon you the seriousness of our request. After you have completed the task we set you, and its ultimate purpose has been consummated, there will be legal ramifications. You will almost certainly be called in to testify."

Blimey. I sucked at the end of my fag and blew out again. I needed the money, but I wasn't sure I needed it _this_ badly. "A few questions. How much were you planning to invest in my services?"

He named a figure with more zeroes than I have incarnations of Pokemon for my Game Boy (I've four). It was by far the most I'd ever been offered for a job. My eyes widened behind my goggles.

"And what—" I cleared my throat. "What, exactly, is it that your employer would like me to do?" For that sort of money I would hack the fucking Pentagon mainframe, I thought, but didn't say.

Salvatore looked me dead in the eye. I sucked in another breath of the stinking air, held it. Waited.

"He would like you to install security cameras around the perimeter and interior of this establishment, as well as set up two stations from which the cameras may be monitored—one on site, another some distance away."

Bloody what? "Pardon?" I asked, thankful for the goggles keeping my disbelieving eyes mostly concealed. I didn't want to seem like an ass, but that was rather a wind-up for _security cameras_. Christ.

His gaze shifted from me to somewhere beyond the bar. "As I said, your part in this may very well end up going beyond the realm of the strictly technical into the legal sphere. Should you choose, of course, to accept our offer."

I pulled out another fag and tapped the filter on the bar. My hands shook slightly as I lit it with the butt end of my last. Seven hundred fifty. I could buy seven hundred fifty brand-fucking-new PS3s with that sort of cash. I could pay my rent for years. Taking another deliberate drag, I watched the smoke dissolve in the moist air of the nightclub. I knew I seemed to be stalling but I had no decision to make. The money had made it for me.

Salvatore was watching my face. "We will, of course, reimburse you for all necessary materials," he said as quietly as he could over the roar from the dance floor.

"Of course," I repeated.

"Would you like to meet with Mr. Grieves now?" he asked gently. I nodded and rose. Seven hundred fifty PS3s. Sometimes the good Lord smiled, even on gentlemen of questionable ethics like myself.

My beer forgotten, I followed Salvatore beyond the humid, pulsing dance floor to a door blended well into the wall. I would have missed it entirely had he not opened it and led me through. As we passed from the nightclub proper into a dimly lit hallway, I sort of came back into myself. The fag I held was no longer only something for me to do with my hands, which might, I thought, have shaken and gestured helplessly about had I not used the cigarette to occupy them while listening to Salvatore's proposal. That was one of the nicest things about cigarettes. I was never at a loss for what to do with my hands.

We stopped before a door almost, but not quite, at the very end of the hall. Salvatore waved me forward and knocked twice on the door.

"Mr. Grieves," he said, his voice now so low it was nearly a whisper, "will see you in a moment."

He left me slouching in the middle of the dim hallway, taking in the pattern of grime on the pale gray walls. It seemed, I noticed, to darken considerably nearest the floor and then blend the wall into the cheap, darker gray carpet. I was struck by the sudden impression that the carpet was gradually swallowing the walls—that it had been doing so quite slowly for years and would continue after I left later that night.

Although I wasn't sure when that time would be, exactly. It was nearly one as it was and the illusory Mr. Grieves had not yet opened the door.

I knocked on the door in an imitation of Salvatore's two-knock salutation, this time slightly louder. When no one answered, I pushed the door open with the knuckles of my non-cig hand.

In retrospect, it was a rather shabby idea on my part. I was in a nightclub owned by a man who may have connections to the Mafia—not known for being the most peaceable blokes, for God's sake—skulking around a back room and generally wandering in areas I hadn't been specifically instructed to wander. Not one of my best. But the evening had been a bit surreal and I'd had a few beers as I waited at the bar and felt a little squiffy as well, and so, I sallied forth.

As the door inched inward, I was greeted with an absolute vision: the most delectable ass I'd ever seen, clad in tight black skinny jeans. Its owner was bent over a roll-top desk opposite the door, presumably examining several blueprints spread over the desk's surface. A gun was tucked securely into the waistband, though how anything fit in those trousers besides that prepossessing posterior was anybody's guess. I leaned forward a little to get a better look at it. A Beretta 92FS. Sexy choice.

But I forgot all about the gun as the posterior's possessor slid one slender hand in an expensive-looking leather glove up the back of a slim thigh and hooked the thumb into the waistband of those blooming tight trousers.

Well. Hello, _you_.

"If you're finished staring," someone said. It took me a moment to realize the speaker was the owner of the bum before me. Oh, Christ. I'd spent the past several seconds admiring the (admittedly very nice) ass of some _bloke_.

I was absolutely mortified, not that you'd know it. I stayed cool—an invaluable trick I'd long admired in others and finally cultivated for myself. I leaned against the doorpost and took another hit off my fag, relaxing my mouth as I blew a stream of smoke into the room.

He stood up slowly, shifting his weight to one hip as he rolled the blueprints. "If you're finished staring," he repeated, dropping the prints into a cardboard cylinder propped against the desk, "perhaps we can talk business."

I didn't respond. There was something odd about this man. In addition to the tight black trousers, he wore a short red quilted vest that left his slender midriff exposed. His blond hair fell in a straight sheet to mid-neck. From the back, I might have taken him for an attractive slim-hipped girl.

This guy was Mafia?

"Have a seat, if you would, Mr. Rogers," he said, the command in his tone belying the polite words, and I knew—I fucking _knew_—what it was about him that had me so unsettled. I couldn't move myself to sit. The beer that had me so brave on entering the office was sloshing around in my stomach. I moved my hand to my face to wipe away the nervous moisture collecting on my forehead, but sucked at the end of my fag instead. Couldn't let him see me uncomfortable. Couldn't let him see me shake. I left the cigarette in my mouth and shoved both my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans. Fuck. Oh, fuck.

He turned around. My churning gut went icy.

Mello.

His eyes widened. For a moment he looked like his younger self, the Mello who had talked me into running a loop of pre-recorded footage on the orphanage security cameras so he and I could sneak out into the nearby village and coerce drunks stumbling out of the local pub to do our shopping: chocolate bars for Mello, cigarettes for me. He was the sensitive boy who convinced me time and again that there were no greater virtues than justice and integrity, and the havoc we wreaked upon Wammy's was somehow invaluable practice for our assumption into the ranks of world-renowned detectives. Gossiping about test scores. Trading case histories like ghost stories until all hours. Tapping out Morse code with our pens, our version of passing notes in class.

But then the gray eyes narrowed and it was like a punch to my sickened gut. I saw how he'd aged. He was still thin, but taller, nearly as tall as I was. His angular jaw was stripped of its boyhood softness. His chin was sharper. And, as he shifted himself to lean back against the desk, as he languidly crossed one long leg over the other, I realized what it was about him that had me shaking and sweating.

Mello was sexy as hell. And he fucking knew it.

I steadied myself, pulled one hand from my pocket to lift the cigarette from my mouth, exhaled smoke slowly. He didn't move, only watched me. I waited as long as I could stand to wait while he scrutinized me, the silence thick, until I could no longer stand the gray eyes on me and the tightness in my chest and the backbeat still audible from the nightclub proper.

"Are you Grieves?" My voice sounded hoarse. I cursed inwardly.

Mello didn't flinch. "I'm Mr. Grieves. Have a seat." He nodded to a straight-backed wooden chair against the wall, thankfully close. I sank onto it.

He studied me again for a few long seconds. "I assume Mr. Salvatore has filled you in on all the pertinent details." _Mister_ Grieves. _Mister_ Salvatore. These Mafia types were so fucking polite.

"He has." I drew my cigarette away from myself and, hardly daring to believe my own audacity, tapped my forefinger lightly on the butt end of the fag. He watched the ash fall to the floor.

"You have decided to accept our offer."

"I have." So that's how he'd decided to play it. No big to-do. As if he ran into estranged childhood friends so often it wasn't even worth mentioning any longer. He hadn't bothered to make a sign to warn me that someone might have been listening in on our conversation or frighten me into following his lead. It irked me, but I had to go along with it. After all, he had the gun. Blast from the past or not, I wasn't sure he wouldn't use it if provoked. Young Mello had a violent temper, and I didn't yet know whether or not he had mellowed with age. Eurgh, what a horrible irony if he'd taken the alias as a suggestion. No, I doubted he had.

But even in his confidence that I would submit to his handling of the situation, I was reminded again of the boy Mello. It was like him to have the upper hand.

No. It was like him to _need_ to have the upper hand. Hell, it'd been his need to be the best, to maintain control, which drove him from Wammy's in the first place. Here, now, in this tiny office, Mello had it. And it wasn't just the stupid gun.

Which idiot gave Mello a gun, anyway? If he'd had one when I knew him, there would have been at least one severely injured white-haired child detective I could name—probably more. I wondered if he'd ever used it and banished the thought immediately. Of course he'd used it. The man had dangerous _elbows_, for Christ's sake.

The long silences were unnerving. Mello never used to shut the fuck up.

I looked down at my fag. The cherry was too close to the filter. I'd have to put it out soon. If I lit up again, it would become obvious that I was chain-smoking. Mello might take that as an indicator of my unease. Very well. This would be my last until I left the club.

But I'd need another, and soon. I hated to let him fucking out-_wait_ me into speaking first, Mello, who'd had all the patience of a car alarm in a church parking lot, but I didn't know what I might do if I had to play along much longer. Probably nothing. I was passive to a fault. Always a first time, though. I had to move the charade along.

"Mr. Salvatore mentioned security cameras," I said by way of asking for more information.

Mello nodded and pursed his lips thoughtfully, gazing somewhere above my right ear. His scrutiny had unsettled me, but his refusal to look me in the eye pissed me right off. "You'll install security cameras in the interior and around the perimeter of the building. The grainier, the better. Buy them secondhand if you can. They must work—but not well."

I raised an eyebrow, which he either missed entirely behind my goggles or else he chose to ignore.

"I've set aside a back room in the club as a security station. I'll expect you to be able to monitor the camera feed from an offsite location as well. Doesn't matter where, so long as I know where to find you."

"All right," I said. My fag had burnt down to its filter. I looked back up at Mello who was, once again, watching me. I flicked the butt of my fag. From the periphery of my vision I saw the cherry fall and bounce twice on the floor. Eyes still locked with his, I ground the cherry into the carpet with my foot. The steady throb from the club's dance floor filled another long moment. Mello looked away.

"I'll be in touch when we're ready for you to begin the installations."

He turned his back to me and shifted some papers on the desk. Evidently I was dismissed. I wanted to shout and overturn the chair—anything to force him to look back and acknowledge me, not as some hired techno whiz kid but as Matt, as myself. I looked at the gun tucked into his trousers. The boy Mello, I knew; the boy, I'd loved, so much as one fifteen-year-old boy can love another. The man Mello was a stranger. I took particular care to shut the office door silently.

I rolled down the windows of my red Caddy before pulling out of the parking lot. I needed the clarity of the cool night air. The heat and noise and awful stench of the nightclub had muddled my thinking.

Mello. I hadn't seen Mello since L's death, since he stormed out of Wammy's House angry and grieving. We hadn't heard from him since, though plenty of rumors passed through the halls of the orphanage concerning his whereabouts: he'd joined a circus touring seaside villages, he'd been picked up by Her Majesty's Secret Service and was training to become the next Bond. In none of the rumors had he left the country. In none of them had he joined a crime syndicate. But now it seemed that was almost certainly the case. I would never have believed it of him.

But then, I wouldn't have believed it of myself either.

I had told myself that, in this economy, finding a legitimate and permanent tech job would be next to impossible. I needed to eat, and I couldn't depend on some massive American corporation that might outsource my job one week and fold in the next.

The truth was, I still subscribed to the dream of little Matty the world-class detective. I needed a life more interesting than the one I would have as a desk jockey supplemented only by games. If I had to work on the wrong side of the law for a while to get it, then so be it. I had planned to work as a freelance tech whiz only so long as it took me to gather funds enough to begin my own detective agency. I'd been a mercenary for more than a year, and I still hadn't succeeded in putting aside savings for anything but the necessities.

Mello had wanted to be L's successor, possibly because the competition was the main event for Wammy's kids. But I had always liked thinking that, somewhere beyond his fiercely competitive nature, beyond his insatiable drive to be the best, Mello had wanted more than anything to put the universe back in its proper working order.

And little Matt had wanted, so much more than any number of brand-new as-yet-unbeaten video games, to help him do it

* * *

A/N: Hello all and welcome! This is the first fanfic I've written in some time. I've already mapped out the bulk of the plot, now all's left to do is actually _write_ our way there—it's going to be an adventure, I promise you. Updates Sundays. Please feed the author, and I sincerely hope to see you again next week. Ta!


	2. The Case of the Secondhand Cameras

Commedia

Part One: Inferno

Chapter Two: The Case of the Second-Hand Cameras

The call came eight days later—that is, in the time it took me to play through a couple incarnations of _Final Fantasy _and to finish a simple program that correctly predicted the frequency with which I needed to do laundry in order to never run out of clean boxers or socks, as well as reminding me of the impending laundry day with a helpful alert blip on my laptop, which I immediately ignored. Enough time for me to get a bit nervous, not enough to begin looking for a new job.

I was dozing on the worn plaid settee in my only pair of tighty-whiteys (my laptop had been blipping hopefully for the past three days) when my mobile phone chirped, "Look! Listen!"

"Huh?" I startled awake, accidentally kicking the syrupy plate balancing on the arm of the settee, a casualty from yesterday morning's toaster waffles. It clattered to the floor.

"Look! Listen!"

"Fuck," I groaned. "Where the _fuck_."

I finally located the mobile under the couch. Profoundly irritated at having been woken, I flipped it open. "Yeah?"

"Mr. Rogers?" It was Salvatore, his polite restrained voice carrying clearly over the connection.

"Yeah?" I said again and rubbed my eyes, still grainy with sleep, with my free hand. Mister again. No one was ever called "mister" at Wammy's, not Roger, not the professors, not Wammy himself, and I was still unused to it. If they wanted to insist on "mister" rather than giving me one of their silly Mafia nicknames and expecting me to remember everyone else's, that was fine by me. I'd rather not be introduced to a room of burly Italian males as "Freddie Fisheye," thanks. Mister Rogers it was.

"We're ready for you," said Salvatore. "You'll have access to the club between the hours of noon and six p.m. daily. There will be someone at the club to let you in today, but we've made a spare key for you to use in the future. Please use the rear entrance."

"All right." Rear entrance, eh? Sounded like a poorly made low-budget gay porno.

_I let myself in through the back door of the club and made my way down the grubby hallway to a wailing bass. The tool belt strapped around my waist shook with the sexy roll of my hips. My muscles bulged under my horizontally striped wife-beater as I leaned against the doorpost and raised a fist to knock on the office door twice. The door swung open to reveal Mello in his black skinny trousers, the red quilted vest unzipped almost to his navel. He eyed me. "You must be here to fix the cable," he said._

I blinked and shook my head rapidly, still not quite awake.

". . . checkbook on site, so let him know when you're prepared to purchase the necessary equipment."

"Will do," I said, my sleepy brain stumbling to find a way to ascertain whom I was supposed to ask about funds for the cameras and monitors while preventing Salvatore from learning I hadn't been paying attention. "And, er, where can I find him?"

"He'll be in his office, most likely, as he was the first time you met with him." Ah. So it was Mello I'd have to speak with. I wasn't sure how I felt about the prospect. I'd had plenty of time to mull over our last meeting in the past eight days. Hadn't really come to any satisfactory conclusions, but I didn't relish the idea of spending the next few weeks pretending this was the first time I'd made the acquaintance of Mister bloody Grieves.

He'd scared me a little. But I'd been drunk, and it had come as rather a shock to see him. I wouldn't leave our second meeting so unnerved. It's difficult to take a guy completely seriously, Beretta or no, when you know he wet the bed regularly until age twelve.

It took me several minutes to locate my keys (in the refrigerator this time, to the left of a milk bottle which I made a mental note to sniff-check later) and several more to rummage through the laundry bin for the least rank of my t-shirts and jeans. I felt embarrassed for a moment by my lack of clean and unrumpled clothing until I took a look at the date on my cell phone and realized, hey, Mello had known for eight days that I was in Los Angeles. He hadn't made a move to contact me outside today's telephone call, which he'd had his flunky Salvatore make. By all rights I ought to be livid.

And, as soon as I thought about it, I was. That blond son of a bitch had been my best friend for more than ten years before he disappeared. At the very least he owed me a fucking explanation. He hadn't called, hadn't emailed, hadn't sent a letter or a fax or a god-damned carrier fucking pigeon, not since he'd left Wammy's. Not since our cheery and _accidental_ reunion. And he hadn't once called me by my Christian name.

The tires of my Cadillac squealed something awful as I pulled out of the car park of my complex a bit too fast. I took back roads to the nightclub to give myself enough time to cool off. I wasn't one to get truly angry—ever, really—and the force of my own frustration surprised me. I smoked a fag out the open window of the Caddy. The wind ruffled my hair soothingly as I drove, lone palm trees seeming alien for the first time in many months. As I drove, I calmed.

There were many potential reasons that Mello hadn't contacted me. Salvatore's vague reference to "legal ramifications" indicated that this deal, and likely Mello's standing within whichever branch of organized crime he was operating, was highly tenuous. Big-time bosses didn't have offices in the backs of seedy nightclubs, and they sure as hell had more guns than their own around when setting up a contract with an unknown specialist. If I'd been a danger to him, and I'd had any sort of skills with weapons outside first-person-shooters, I could have taken him down easily. His back had been to me when I'd entered the office. He wasn't being careful.

But he'd _known_ I was in the office, perhaps the entire time I was there. Mello had always been cocky but I knew he knew better. He was intentionally making himself vulnerable. I didn't like to speculate for whose benefit. His bosses in the organization, possibly. Intelligence like Mello's was hard to conceal. That, coupled with his competitive nature and newly-developed sex appeal, was probably enough to make the more perceptive of his higher-ups a little wary. Given enough time, Mello could easily disrupt the organization's careful hierarchy of power and gain control of their resources, which were likely considerable. His show of carelessness was all for the bosses. Mello wanted them to think he could be taken down if he started gaining too much power, too much sway in the family. He knew he could never pull off meek or submissive, could not try to convince his bosses that he knew his place, without the act ringing fatally hollow.

He was in this shit up to his skinny neck.

I really hoped he could pull off whatever the fuck he had ultimately planned.

My breathing was even by the time I pulled into the nightclub's car park. The sagging building that housed the club looked strange and sad. On the roof, switched off in the daylight and empty without the contrast of their harsh blaze against the darkness, sat the four-foot letters of the nightclub sign. The individual light-bulbs were visible in the bright afternoon. I checked myself in the rear-view mirror, pushing my goggles up onto my forehead to get a better look at myself. The orange lenses distorted the colors around me, and while I usually didn't mind (better than getting a headache staring at a monitor for hours at a time) I wanted to make sure my cheeks weren't still flushed red with anger. Whatever Mello was up to, I couldn't let a misstep of mine to give him away. No wrong looks, no names. My blushes had always given me away before anything else did. I saw with relief that my cheeks were pale again. Perhaps a little too pale. I put my goggles back on, wincing as they snapped against my skin. Fuck, I'd be just fine. And he'd be fine too, because he was Mello and he had this shit on lockdown. He was too damn smart to get himself killed by some minor regional crime boss. So long as he kept his head cool.

Oh, Christ, I hoped his temper had changed along with the rest of him.

I knocked at the back door of the club. As seemed to be the theme around this place, no one answered. I gave a moment's thought to busting in using an old library card and a little wiggling but soon decided to go with a safer option and light up while I waited instead. The rusted steel door creaked under my weight as I leaned against it, lighter at the ready. It took a few flicks to get the fag lit properly in the steady summer wind.

The door swung inward suddenly and I went stumbling headlong into the hallway within, dropping my cigarette on the damp floor.

"Matt, you asshole," Mello hissed, the door giving a low whine as he pushed it shut, "what in the shit do you think you're doing?"

"All right, Mello?" I said stupidly, scrambling for my fallen fag. Christ. I sounded like an idiot. All right, Mello? Want to skive off class and kick around the football out behind the fucking strawberry patch? Want to come over to my room and play _Super Smash Brothers_ after tea? Small wonder he hadn't called.

He cocked an eyebrow and shifted his weight to one side, giving me a good look at the curve of his hip and that magnum fucking opus ass of his. My face grew warm. I'd thought it was the beer, but I was sober as shit now and Mello still looked damn good. I looked down self-consciously and saw the scuffs of my sneakers, the worn spots on the knees of my jeans, the fraying hem of my t-shirt, quite clearly in the unforgiving brightness of the hallway's fluorescent lights. If only I hadn't been too lazy to do the laundry. I looked and probably smelled like the broke kid I was. And Mello?

Mello was wearing leather trousers.

I thought irritably that it was far too long since I'd last been laid.

He turned and began down the hall without waiting to see if I was following. "I have your key and blueprints for the club on my desk. And—" He stopped short as he reached the office door and threw me a terse backward glance. "Don't smoke in my office."

"Fair enough," I said, pausing to take the fag from my mouth and grind it out against the wall. Mello stared at me for a long moment, his hand on the knob.

"I don't remember you being such a prick," he said finally.

I grinned helplessly. The only retort that came to mind, and which I unfortunately used, was, "You're one to talk."

The corners of Mello's mouth quirked upward in a slight smirk, but only briefly. He pushed open the office door and strode to the desk.

"Shut the door." He opened a bottom drawer and pulled out a ratty blue bath towel, which he tossed to me. "Stuff that around the bottom." I sealed the crack that ran along the bottom of the office door with the towel, taking care to tuck it in firmly around the corners. After I was certain that the door had been well-insulated, I rose and slouched against the door.

"Sit down," he said, leaning back against the desk. Clearly, Mello had grown used to giving orders. I might be on his payroll but I wouldn't let him assume I'd be an obedient lackey.

"I'm fine where I am, thanks." Despite our moment of camaraderie, I was still wary. If I was a prick, then there was no telling what he was. The Beretta glinted from beneath a stack of papers.

He shrugged. "So long as you're comfortable." He passed me the blueprints for the nightclub.

The perimeter would require a basic six-camera setup: two cameras at various distances on both the front and rear entrance, and a single wide-focus camera on each of the two remaining sides. The dance floor and bar area took up about three-fourths of the nightclub's square footage. It wouldn't take many cameras to cover that area, twelve perhaps, so long as I could successfully wire a few of the posts holding up the second-level balcony. Normally I'd pull up the carpets and tape the cords to the floor beneath, but if Mello wanted cheap wires as well as second-hand cameras they probably wouldn't last long under constant kicking and tripping over. I'd be better off attaching those cords to the underside of the balcony, where they were less likely to be abused by the club's drunken patrons.

The hallway would be a bit trickier. It was not straight, a clean shot from one end of the building to the other. Rather, it wound around the building's perimeter jerkily, accommodating the club's bathrooms and the various storage spaces. My best bet was probably to start installing the cameras and test the available angles as I went. I'd need eight cameras at the very least to cover the hallway, fourteen at the most.

"You're going to need anywhere between twenty-six and thirty-two cameras," I said, glancing at him over the top of the blueprints. Mello was cleaning his fingernails with a vicious-looking letter opener. "Wiring will depend on where you want the feed to go. You wanted to export the feed off-site, yeah?"

Mello nodded once without looking up.

"Well, would you prefer something I can set up quickly or do you want a protected connection? It'll take longer if I'm to write a program, and—"

"It should be as secure as possible," he said shortly.

I raised my eyebrows. _Some_body had his knickers in a bunch.

"And the wires should be the best," he continued, raising his hand to examine his nails closely. "Buy them new."

I gave the blueprints a quizzical look, unwilling to question Mello directly. This job was shaping up to be the strangest I'd ever had. Second-hand cameras would ensure poor picture quality. Why go to the trouble of good wiring and a secure connection? Why the off-site monitor of the camera feeds? With the kind of cash they'd offered me, I'd expected to hack something major, not install security cameras. Fuck, any moron with a B.A. could set up a halfway decent surveillance system. The grainy feeds from the cameras were meant to both record _and conceal_ an intended crime, and it was something seriously fucking huge.

A rustle from across the room roused me from my contemplation. I looked up to see Mello lifting himself smoothly from the desk.

"Buy thirty-two," he said, and turned to deposit the letter opener in an open drawer. I could tell by the clang of the metal, even muffled as it was by the drawer and its other contents, how hard he had slapped it down against the wood. Mello was tense, and he was working very hard to appear at ease. Was it for my benefit, or someone else's? I was reminded of the possibility I'd examined in the car—the likelihood that Mello was affecting carelessness to put his higher-ups off their guard.

"Mello," I began. As he turned toward me, his blond hair swung forward and caught the light slanting from the office's only window. I stared. Mello's hair had been pale when we were children, but now it shone gold. Had he dyed it? Was it something about L.A. that had brightened it, a side effect of the smog coming over from China I'd heard so much about on the news? Longing surged in my chest—Mello's flaxen hair had always reminded me of one of my few memories of my family, my father tickling my four-year-old self with corn silk husked from a roasted cob after dinner, me shrieking and kicking a little too hard, him swearing and laughing and holding his injured shin.

Mello tapped something impatiently against the side of the desk with a plastic smack and I realized I probably ought to finish whatever it was I had been saying. "—er—do you, do you keep your back turned on purpose?" I finished lamely, hoping he'd understand what I was asking despite my apparent inability to put it into a cogent phrase.

Mello smirked. "Been checking out my ass, Mattykins?" he asked, buffing his fingernails against the leather at the swell of his hip.

How in the bollocks did he know? The man was _creepy_ aware of his surroundings. "No," I said, quite definitely, but I could feel my cheeks grow a bit warm.

The corners of Mello's mouth deepened into an absolutely wicked grin. "I always had you pegged for a shirtlifter," he said, and sauntered past me, out of the office, dropping a credit card among the blueprints in my lap.

Cocky bastard. He probably thought everyone and their second-grade teacher were out to boff him.

I stuffed the credit card into my back pocket, unsure whether I wanted laugh or scowl. I could try both at once but Mello would probably think I'd gone mad. I wasn't sure I hadn't. My cheeks grew warmer in my confusion. I'd assumed I would feel more comfortable once Mello stopped calling me "Rogers" but evidently that was not the case. On the contrary, I was more flummoxed than I had been in quite some time.

Mello's footsteps echoed hollowly down the hall and through the office door. I felt less addled with him out of my immediate area, my face cooling, my brain returning to its usual smoothly efficient processes. Had I ever been such a flaming prat around Mello? I wasn't sure. If ickle Matty had made himself foolish, I don't know he would have cared. The presumed reasons for my unease—the strange circumstances of our reunion, the booze, the Beretta—were fast slipping away, leaving only the blond himself as the source of my discomfort.

I _was_ uncomfortable. But I was also curious. I had always been one to pick at scabs, the rough red patch lifting gradually beneath my fingernails to reveal puckered pink skin underneath. Sure, I was technically Mello's employee, but I wasn't sure I wanted to let this alone until I'd sussed out what exactly was up: with me, with him, with this whole strange job.

I might have been overstepping my bounds, not that it had been made clear to me what they were. I wanted to know. I wanted to fucking know—something, anything I could pull out of him without giving everything away, whatever the fuck everything was. I crumpled the blueprints under my arm and walked out of the office. Fortunately, Mello had only got about halfway down the hall.

"Mello, hold on." He stopped and turned to stare at me. "The second-rate cameras and the first-rate wires, the secure connection, the dual feeds—what the fuck's going on?"

Mello's face was absolutely impassive. "Isn't anything, Matty." He turned away and sauntered off again. Well, that was rubbish if I ever heard it.

"Bull shit, Mel."

"Hope you're getting a good look," he said, his swagger becoming all the more pronounced.

"Hard to miss," I muttered.

"Better get your finger out," he suggested. "All the respectable places will be closing in an hour. That's something else I want from you. Respectability. At least for the time being."

Unsurprisingly and most unfortunately, I did not fail to interpret that a number of ways. I blushed in earnest and got the fuck out.

Mello had, however temporarily, succeeded in shutting me up and making me his (albeit well-paid) bitch. But I would be damned before I'd spend the next few weeks pretending to be a good girl, on my back thinking of England. I'd know the full details of the situation soon enough, and what was more, Mello himself would tell me.

And naturally, he would know bugger all about it.

* * *

I had mentally filed away the location of Al's shop months ago when I'd first learned of it through a fellow free-lance tech whiz. We were coding out a series of intricate firewalls for a private corporation, working out of a small warehouse fifteen minutes outside Sacramento. The job itself took about a week. We slept on old mattresses pulled up to the network we'd set up and spread out across the warehouse floor, and took turns driving into Sacramento for Indian take-out and beer.

The name he'd given me the first day was Jeb Kansas, though it too was probably an alias. He had hesitated slightly before saying it, which struck me as odd. I expected aliases in my line of work, but Jeb's pause brought to mind something that was missing in my own easy tossing around of "Fred Rogers," of "Harry Jones," and even of "Matt," the name I'd used so long I truly thought of it as my own. The reluctance manifest in Jeb's hesitation was totally unfamiliar to me, I'd hidden behind false names so long. Mine had never once felt like lies.

It was the reluctance to divulge that had piqued my interest. False names are only so many invisible masks, to be assumed and discarded as the wearer willed. I couldn't comprehend why Jeb had such emotion invested in the use of an alias, which was as much a tool as his prized Edsyn soldering iron.

The memory of Jeb's pause might have been easily lost among the details of twenty or so other jobs I'd pulled since my return to L.A., were it not for the way he had shaken my hand on our final day on the job. He moved into the handshake. I began to back away, unsure what he was on about and cautious as I always was while the job. "I'm Joey," he said in his coarse Midwestern accent, and I froze. His hazel eyes held my own for an earnest moment, and then he released my hand and left the warehouse without speaking another word. I don't know why he decided to tell me his name. We had rarely spoken as we worked. Maybe he saw something in me, thought I would understand something about the nature of the business that bothered him. I'd glanced over at him once or twice during his six-hour sleep break (we worked and slept in shifts). His solemn eyes were wide open, staring steadily into the high curve of the warehouse roof. Whatever it was that pressed Jeb from sound sleep and into divulging his name to a near-total stranger, I had never been able to quite work out.

It was from Jeb—from Joey—I'd learned about Al Hampton and his rather questionable electronics business. I'd accidentally blown a motherboard in one of Jeb's laptops in a tragic beer accident and Jeb had driven me to Al's for a replacement. Al was a friend, he told me over the soft sound of Chicago issuing from the speakers of Jeb's Buick sedan, and he could get us a pretty sweet deal on a motherboard that would "beat paying shipping on NewEgg."

Al's was roughly thirty minutes from L.A., so it was around four-thirty by the time I finally pulled into the small car park behind the shop. Al's was housed in a converted two-story residential house in downtown La Habra, a neat little Victorian-style place, which I liked better than those fake-adobe monstrosities I saw so often in L.A. A hand-painted wooden sign out front proclaimed "AL'S COMPUTER PARTS _AND MORE!_"

And Al had more, all right. He had set up shop in La Habra in the late 80's selling computer parts, massive clunky things they were at the time, and was one of the first in the business when the Silicon Valley black market in electronics really began booming in '92. Al specialized in surveillance equipment, second-hand cameras and bugs, much of it discarded by the United States federal government when upgrades became necessary and re-appropriated by local hackers friendly with Al and looking to make a bit of fast cash for a new video card or more RAM.

A small bell tinkled against the door handle as I walked into the shop. Al's head was just barely visible behind an empty tower. He was fiddling in a plastic drawer containing a variety of capacitors and didn't seem to notice as I approached the long, low coffee table that served as his workbench.

"Hang on a sec," he said finally, seizing upon a particular capacitor and separating it from the rest into a small plastic dish. He wiped his ruddy hands on his belly as he stood, leaving gray smudges on his Hawaiian-print shirt. Al was one of the most personable computer technicians I'd ever met, talkative and prone to loud laughter. His bright blue eyes twinkled at me through gold-rimmed bifocals and I wondered, as I had the first time I'd met him, how it was that someone who so resembled Father Christmas had got into black-market electronics.

"Freddie Rogers," I said by way of introduction. Hoping he'd remember our earlier meeting though it had been several months, I continued, "I'm Jeb's friend."

"That's right, the one with the boozy motherboard. Hard to forget those." He tapped his cheekbone in reference to my goggles.

I grinned. "Rough business staring at all those screens all the time. On the subject of rough business, I've a financially savvy club owner up in L.A. looking to set up a security system with used materials, you know, times being what they are. Heard you were the man to help me out."

"Heard right. What do you need?"

"Neighborhood of thirty-two cameras. My employer's got a bit of a fetish as well—wants cameras made before '87. Can I arrange for a delivery Monday of next week?"

"Sure, just give me a few minutes to make sure I have what you need in stock. I'll be upstairs."

As it transpired, Al did have enough older cameras to round out the order. I filled in the delivery form and paid for the cameras with Mello's credit card. And then, as though an afterthought, I added a newer and considerably smaller wireless camera and a high-quality bug to another purchase form and charged it to my own bank card. After all, I reasoned, wind whistling through the open windows as I sped down I-5, it wasn't as though Mello would volunteer any information about the job to me willingly.

And he _had_ teased me about staring at his ass.

* * *

A/N: Phew! Slogging through parts of this chapter took a considerable amount of effort, probably because a lot of it was necessary to set up more exciting things later on but isn't as inherently exciting as those parts. Hope you enjoyed it, though. I'll say see you next Sunday, though don't worry if I'm a few days late—I have a few exams and papers coming due before the end of the week.

A contest! Who can correctly identify the 90's cult classic that Mello quotes during Matt's brief (and telling) foray into the wonderful world of imaginary pornography?


End file.
